


Not Quite the Trans-Siberian

by Tailish



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (But the author doesn't), 5+1 Fic, BAMF Bucky Barnes, BAMF Clint, BAMF Phil Coulson, Canon-Typical Violence, Clint speaks Russian, Clint/Coulson Get Together, Completed, Developing Relationship, M/M, Not entirely canon-compliant, Some elements from the Hawkeye comics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-04-24
Packaged: 2019-04-21 15:49:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 14,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14288256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tailish/pseuds/Tailish
Summary: Clint's been to Russia more often than he ought to, really.(5+1 fic of the five times Clint went to Russia, and the one time he stayed home.)





	1. PART 1

**Author's Note:**

> Greetings, all!  
> This is my first work published here, and I hope it’s up to the standards of the site.  
> Warning for swearing, so much swearing, and slightly graphic violence (nothing much worse than MCU canon). Let me know if the rating needs to be moved up to mature.  
> Russian is represented with underlined English, because I refuse to submit such a beautiful language to the butchery of Google Translate and my own frankenstinian attempts.

He was twenty three the first time he went to Russia.

It wasn’t the first time he’d gone overseas to finish a contract. He’d been strictly domestic at first, running all over the country to finish off a senator here, a corrupt CEO there, a child trafficker in the next state. It didn’t matter to him who his targets were, as long as they’d done something unforgiveable (in his books, and his books had wide definitions of unforgiveable), and someone else wanted them dead, and that someone was willing to pay him a lot of money to turn the target’s deceased statements from practical to official.

People who landed themselves at the wrong end of his barrel didn’t stand a chance of survival. He was good (he was one of the best) like that.

But the hunting grounds in the good ‘ol US of A were limited, and for the first time in his life he had the means, the contacts, to forge documents and go wherever he wanted in the world (and he used it to become a renowned assassin, and damn if that didn’t leave him sleepless at night, but Barney had left him and now he was so alone that leaving for somewhere new didn’t seem worth it anymore). First it was Panama, then Cuba, a stint in Egypt, some brief work in Thailand that made him swear never to go back to any place with so much water ever again, because ew, snakes. And now, Moscow, Russia. He wasn’t fond of cold places, but then again, he wasn’t fond of being found by the Feds because he couldn’t sluice the money for his five-odd safe houses around the country to the appropriate owners any more. He was getting tired of it all, of the shooting and the running and the killing, but there was no end in sight on that front, so he told himself to keep going and took the Russia job.

He was here as Hawkeye to take out a former KGB agent, someone who’d pissed on the wrong person’s parade back home, and who therefore now needed to go. The lady also had an unfortunate habit of keeping indentured servants without pay at her _daca_ down near Sochi, and treating them so roughly that their families were afraid to report the bruising to the appropriate medical authorities. She needed to go, and therefore she entirely coincidentally walked into his view over the long-range rifle he preferred for jobs like this – more anonymous than his bow or the dual katanas he wielded when his grasp on morality was less well defined than it was when he was Hawkeye.

Because that was the thing. Hawkeye may have just been a stage name, a persona for him to put on and wave around in front of the crowd so they wouldn’t see the young, frightened Clint Barton, but at the end of the day Hawkeye was a part of Clint, and he couldn’t prevent the two from getting mixed up. It was the same with Ronin, except he wasn’t a product of a young, hopeful Clint looking to impress Trickshot, the one man who’d ever given him his full attention (and until the attention turned sour, that was the most precious gift he had ever been given, and he would have done – did do – anything to keep it). Ronin was a product of Clint on the run, halfway to making a name for himself as the best marksman out for sale, and he was more cynical, darker, but equally a part of Clint Barton. If he allowed himself to think about it, it scared him sometimes that he carried those so very different characters inside of him, scared him that he was able to be so dark at the drop of a hat, and retain his morality at other times. He didn’t let himself think.

He was lying low on the gravel roof of the building across from the library, where the lovely lady was attending a fundraiser against children’s illiteracy, and dear everloving fuck was it cold. The snow that had been falling from the sky for the past hour was a substance closer to sleet, and it was soaking through the fingerless gloves he was wearing on his hands. Couldn’t wear normal gloves, not with his occupation and habit of free-climbing down the sides of buildings to avoid pursuit, but he wished he’d brought some after all. Figures he’d pick a job in goddamn Russia in late fall over some kind of security contract in Hawaii he hadn’t looked at too closely (because the target didn’t deserve to die, but damn if his scruples weren’t leading to him inconveniently freezing his ass of right now). The tall, lead-paned windows provided a perfect view into the large room on the ground floor where the reception was being held. All he had to do was wait for the nice lady to step out the side entrance where her car was waiting for her (really, side entrance? Nice try), put an unmarked bullet through her throat, and scurry back to the safe house he’d prepared a day earlier where hopefully the heating hadn’t completely broken down yet.

The light pouring out of the library’s windows flickered as silhouettes inside the building walked past or stopped to chat. He couldn’t hear the music inside, but judging from the quality and weave of the fabric of the dresses the women wore, and the shine of the watches at the men’s wrists, it would be something classical, probably with a nice melody and smooth notes. If he could have heard it–

He let out a long, measured breath. He wouldn’t recognize it anyway, considering an assassin’s lifestyle didn’t leave much time for listening to classical music, and before that, well.

Well.

The silhouettes in front of the windows were still moving, gliding back and forth when the only hint of the shadow’s approach caught his eye. A glint, white-grey metal shining in his peripheral vision, and then the other man was upon him, knocking him off his stance and arms circling around his shoulders as they rolled across the gravel surface of the roof. He tried to get an arm out, reach the knife in the sheath on his waist, but the other man was behind him, metal hand (metalhandmetalhandmetalhand, what the actual fuck?) pinning his upper arms to his chest and a very warm, very human arm covered in kevlar pressing down on his windpipe. He kicked a leg out, hoping to strike a shin or a kneecap or something, but all he got for his trouble was a muffled grunt from behind a mask, and goddammit, he was a sniper but he wasn’t bad at hand to hand, unless he was really falling behind on his training regimen, as seemed to be indicated by the ease with which this man held him captive.

“Who are you,” the man in the mask (with a metal hand, what the fuck, a metal hand, he could see it shining in the faint light from the library windows, a metal hand, that should be ringing a bell but it wasn’t, because he was just a bit distracted trying to get free) spat in his ear, neatly sidestepping Clint’s attempt at putting his combat-booted heel through the man’s toes, and how the hell had this guy made it up here without him noticing in the first place, anyway?

“Not your friend, buddy,” he tried to snark (and sue him, so maybe he didn’t have great self-preservation instincts, but there wasn’t much other than sarcasm that one could resort to in this type of situations – not that he’d ever been in one quite like this before), all the while puzzling. His hearing wasn’t great, never had been, but he was on a gravel roof and he was Hawkeye, for fuck’s sake, he _noticed_ things. He would definitely have noticed someone tripping any of the three traps in the stairwell, the fourth on the door entrance to the roof, or the fifth and sixth on the fire escape. They were his traps, so they were almost impossible to avoid (he wasn’t cocky, he was _realistic_ ), and that meant either this guy had transported here by magical beam or-

Fuck.

Metal hand (not a hand, an arm, a man in a mask with a metal arm), speaks Russian, has the ability to sneak up on one of the best assassins in the world over a gravel roof.

It wasn’t so much that the Soldat was a legend as that he was a spectre. Everybody in Clint’s line of work had heard of him, knew he existed, knew he was incomparable to normal people, but nobody talked about him. It wasn’t like assassins held trade conferences or annual meetings, but as a whole they thrived off information and _knowing_. They kept track of who was currently out in the field, of who was taking which contracts. The Soldat was different. No one knew where he came from, or who he was, or whether he was just one man or multiple people using the same pseudonym. The rumours about him that might be halfway true were that he was dangerous, ruthless, not to be crossed if it could be at all avoided, and employed by very, very powerful people.

And he was here tonight, on Clint’s roof (granted, it was a shitty roof, but there was a certain courtesy to taking out the same target – assuming that was what the Soldat was here to do, not take out Clint – and picking different roofs was part of it), and he had gone completely still behind him at the sound of Clint’s voice.

“Who are you,” the voice behind him hissed with so much venom he felt the hairs on his arms stand up, and he really didn’t want to answer that question, but, but.

“I don’t speak Russian, jerk.” Clint felt the body behind him tense even further, almost as if the man was reacting purely to the sound of the words and not their meaning, because nobody could be _that_ upset by his not speaking any Russian, could they (and sure, his Russian actually wasn’t great, but he knew enough to understand this man’s question, and know that he absolutely could not answer it)?

Except it seemed like the Soldat _was_ that upset, because he released the pressure on Clint’s windpipe and spun him around, gripping his shoulders to hold him in place as he faced him. Dark, angry brown eyes stared at him over the top of the mask (and now that Clint was so close he could see the details of it, the strap at the side of the jawline, almost like a muzzle, but why would the Soldat wear a muzzle?), and now he was sure that he’d interfered with the Soldat’s mission somehow, whatever it was, and that the man behind those angry brown eyes would kill him on this snowy roof in a shitty part of Moscow and leave his body behind to confuse a few dumbass policemen, and _wow_ , wouldn’t that just make his mother proud.

However, the Soldat apparently hadn’t gotten the about-to-be-killed memo, because he was looking at him now with those dark, dark eyes, and Clint could swear that behind the anger (and man, was there ever anger. This guy held enough spite in his eyes to burn down a small town; why he wasn’t taking it out on him, Clint didn’t know) there was confusion and sadness layered over one another.

“Who are you?” The words were quieter this time, and Clint was pretty sure that he wasn’t fooling the Soldat with his don’t-speak-the-language act. But a name was everything in their line of work, and if word got out that Hawkeye had been the one to take out a target (actual word, instead of unconfirmed circumstantial rumour, which happened all the time), he’d never be hired again by anyone. Besides, it didn’t look like the Soldat was asking for his employers. His hands were still on Clint’s shoulders, keeping him in place, but he wasn’t pressing, wasn’t shaking or pulling out knives or guns to threaten him with.

They both knew that the Soldat could best him in under ten seconds at hand combat. He’d recognised it when the man first tackled him and took him away from his rifle without even breathing hard. He could probably subdue him without making any noise, especially since Clint was here alone, and unwilling to give away his position to the target across the street. If the Soldat was as ruthless as they claimed, he could definitely extract any information he wanted from him.

So why wasn’t he? Why was this ghost standing on a snowy rooftop in Moscow, asking him his name? It wasn’t because Clint was a threat, or because they had conflicting targets. No, there had to be another reason for the Soldat to want to know who he was.

“Hawk-” he rasped. “I’m Hawkeye. I can’t – you know I can’t give you more than that.” He was pretty sure the Soldat spoke English from the way he’d reacted to his previous replies. And if he didn’t, Clint figured he’d given the man his name anyway. There wasn’t much more that could happen now that would fuck him over worse than having his name out, and there wasn’t much more use he’d be to the Soldat now that the man had the information he apparently wanted. Clint was going to get himself killed by a ghost, and he took a brief moment to regret that nobody important would miss him very much as the Soldat was pulling a handgun from the holster on his tac vest, aiming, and taking the shot along his elbow down into the street below.

Clint spun, looking to the side entrance, and sure enough the lady he’d been targeting was down with a shot to the chest, a kill shot less than an inch to the right off-ideal (over fifty yards, crosswind due to the vortex created down in the street below, plus difficult sighting with the snow, an excellent shot – but not a perfect one), surrounded by screaming, panicking civilians. He turned to look behind him, but the Soldat, the man who had just finished his contract for him, who was known for not leaving any loose ends behind, the ghost professional assassins told horror stories about, was gone. He’d left Clint alive on the roof, shaking with adrenaline and the cold, and as the screaming in the street grew louder and he mechanically disassembled his rifle and ghosted out of the building, taking his traps with him along the way, all he could think about was the strange mix of disappointment and relief that had flitted over the Soldat’s face after he had told him his name.


	2. PART 2

He met the Soldat again the next time he went to Russia, and then again after that, and again. They ran similar kinds of contracts, although he wasn’t entirely sure the Soldat was an independent like him – too many men in black suits with blank faces and Moscow-stained Russian who seem to know all of his perches at all times. But the Soldat is almost as good as he is with a rifle, and miles better at hand-to-hand combat. They don’t talk, or even fight, unless they’re on actively conflicting sides of an ongoing brawl. He mostly knew the Soldat was there from the glint of another barrel trained on the same mark, or from a shadow sprinting away after someone had shot his contractor in the chest after the man had gone to the same function as Clint’s mark. Clint wasn’t hired to do protection detail though, so he carefully aims, shoots the original target, and leaves through the back alleys of St. Petersburg.

The next time they were face to face was during contract he’d taken on a shipping captain in Vladivostok transporting something more interesting than just consumer goods over the Pacific. He’d set up on one of the low-rise port management buildings half a mile away from the actual port, patiently waiting for the man to walk to his ship and into his view, when there’d been a commotion down in the shipyard next to the containers, right in front of his convenient little building. He glanced down from his rifle to see that Captain Druglord’s sailors have gotten themselves into a brawl with someone who seems to be not only significantly more talented than they are, but also significantly stronger and faster. Soldat, then.

The man’s good. Seriously good, in fact. He’d known this already, felt it in action two years ago on that roof in Moscow, but now, with the high view he’s always seen better from, he could observe the raw talent in fighting the man has. He’s strong, he’s fast, and he is exactly as ruthless as they whisper. The sailors who run at him don’t get back up once they go down, and Clint spared a brief moment to feel jealous because man, this guy has skills.

Then the shipping captain came running over to the sound of the brawl, and he ignored the Soldat to settle into the familiar rhythm of inhale, sight, exhale, shoot. The bullet sped past the Soldat’s blurry figure and into the captain’s head, and Clint didn’t spare the yard below him another glance before he’d slung the rifle onto his back and jumped off the roof to skirt around the edges of the brawl so he can make it to the contact point he’d established with his contractors. There were just three guys still standing now, and as Clint jogs around the outside of the terrain the Soldat takes them down in a breathtaking attack of _punch, shift, grab and throw, shift, kick, dodge, punch, punch, kick_. Before he’d even crossed half the length of the yard, the last three guys were down, and the Soldat stood in the middle of the area, scanning for more threats. It was obvious he’d seen Clint the moment the man had shot the captain from the roof, and Clint had been making no attempt to hide, so he waved and kept jogging. The Soldat threw a puzzled squints at him over the edges of his mask, as if Clint’s behaviour is confusing him, but while Clint was looking in his direction, he slowly lifted up his right arm and waves back.

Later, when he’d left Russia for warmer climes, he asked around his contacts a bit and did some digging. The man seems to confine himself mostly to the Eurasian continent, and as much as he’s a spectre with no facts to the rumours attached to him, its almost certain his employers like him to be showy and brutal in his operations. There are stories of the kills the man had been involved in, of how he is indiscriminate in who he murders, regardless of age or sex. None of Clint’s contacts, few as they are, know who employs him or what his fees are. The Soldat never responds to jobs via the usual routes, and there are whispers he’s a government man. His ghost story, Clint comes to suspect, is as much of a weapon as the man himself.

They’d never spoken again after that one night in Moscow, and the Soldat rarely even acknowledges his presence like he’d done in the shipyard, but Clint figures that since the man hadn’t murdered him yet, they’re not enemies.

They meet again, sometimes in Russia, sometimes not. They are two of the best people in their field (and although his field is killing people for money, Clint allows himself to feel proud of that sometimes, proud of the fact that a dumb carnie from the middle of nowhere had grown up to be good at something, however illegitimate), and they respect each other. Clint trains at hand-to-hand combat until he’s better, much better than that night, and he knows that he’ll never make it to the level the Soldat, but he’s okay with that, because he’s the better shot. Once, on perches in two trees on opposite sides of a hostage exchange he’d been paid ridiculously good money for, Clint amused himself by shooting arrows into the branches surrounding the Soldat to make pinecones fall on his head, and from the downright murderous glare the other man shot in his direction he’d been sure that this time, he’s crossed the line and won’t make it out alive. But instead of killing him, the Soldat retaliated by giving away Clint’s position to the other guards and drawing all of the hired muscle (correction: hired muscle who are not two of the world’s best assassins) to his position, presumably to watch him struggle to beat them all up the way they both knew the Soldat could.

Clint’s not sure where the guy’s sense of humour was at, but he kind of liked it.


	3. PART 3

The tenth time he went to Russia he was twenty seven, and at the end of his rope.

He’d been running from what seemed like the entire world for the past year, taking contracts on the fly and leaving nothing but trails of blood and dirt behind him as the authorities back home tried to variously incarcerate him, kill him, or hire him to do their dirty work. He’d rebuffed all of their advances, fled across the Atlantic, detoured to Asia Minor, and now he was back in Russia again, hiding out in a small town in the ass end of Novosibirsk Oblast. He was bruised, hungry, and once again he was freezing.

It was, he thought, the one thing all of his previous jobs in Russia had in common. The wind and the constant snow or rain, and the ever-present cold that always seemed to follow him, regardless of where he went. Maybe it was that he had shitty timing, and always managed to end up in Russia near the winter, or maybe it was just that any temperature below 50 Farenheit would make him feel cold, or maybe it was the fact that he hadn’t slept in three days and was crouched into the furthest corner of an abandoned chicken coop, hoping that the assholes who’d chased him here after his latest job would give up and go home already, seriously, it was below freezing and fucking _cold_. He was pretty sure that they were the ones who put out the previous job in the first place – who the hell actually wanted rid of a small arms dealer in northern Uzbekistan? Not the minor Chinese gang setting up the contract, who shouldn’t even have had enough resources to offer the ridiculously high bounty they’d had – and he was also pretty sure they were not private, but part of some kind of government agency. He’d seen the matching logos on the gear of the goons they’d sent in to pin him down back in Uzbekistan, and known that no self-respecting Chinese criminal organisation would choose a stylized facsimile of the US eagle as their brand. Plus, they were here in Novosibirsk, searching for him in the middle of a snowstorm after shooting up the meeting place back in Uzbekistan. The government it was, then, although all bets were still out on which government, and why the hell they wanted to get their hands on him so badly. Sure, what he was doing was illegal, but governments generally didn’t try too hard to interfere Clint’s particular kind of illegality. People like him were too useful for that.

Outside, the snow was coming down harder and harder as the light outside the chicken coop faded to dusk. Either the assholes had given up, and he could sneak his way into town after dark in the hope of finding an open bar to thaw his frozen bones, and rebandage the bullet wound in his thigh, or they were still lurking around outside waiting him out.

If he had to stay out all night, he knew, there was a slim chance he’d survive until the morning.

Through the gaps in the slats of the coop, he could observe the light fading more and more, although the sun was hidden behind the thick clouds of snow. The sound of the wind was muffled by the thick layer of white that covered the entire landscape, and if he turned his head just so he could look out towards the other houses in the town, maybe a hundred yards away. His gear was nowhere near able to cope with this weather, not even inside the coop, but it couldn’t exactly get worse if he had to go outside into the storm to walk towards the houses, especially if he could find somewhere warm to rest afterwards. He could easily do it without being seen by the locals, but if the assholes were still here, they could almost certainly best him at this point. He’d lost all but two of his guns, and he had no more energy left.

Really, he realized, it was either die out here in the cold, or at least attempt to get into the warmth and maybe get shot for his trouble.

With every muscle burning in agony after having been locked in one position for so long, he slowly got up and crossed to the door of the chicken coop, pushing it outwards against the wind. A cold flurry of snow drifted in at his feet, and for a moment he stood in the doorway staring at the landscape outside. The sun must have fully set, because the sky was a dark, infinite mass of clouds from which the snow fell. Out in the distance the houses of the town were outlined against the endless white of the fields around them, windows glowing around the edges with the soft yellow light of indoor lamps.

The emotion hit him all of the sudden. It reminded him of – fuck, but it reminded him of Iowa in midwinter, when he’d gone out for a walk with his mom and she’d laughed and smiled and played with him until after the sun went down. He still remembered her hair covered in snowflakes and the brownish, faded colour of the long coat she wore outside the house when it was cold. When they’d come back, walking over the drive towards the old house, it had glowed around the edges of the windows just like these houses here, on the other side of the world twenty years later. Here too little boys would settling down for dinner with their family, while mothers smiled bright smiles to their children to convince them to eat their beans. Maybe they’d ask to be read to later in the night, and their mother would oblige, telling them the stories of their family’s history interspersed with fairy tales. Maybe their mother would kiss them goodnight after she’d turned off the lights, and maybe she would whisper a quiet “I love you” into the dark room before closing the door.

Clint stared at the town from the doorway, the snow by his feet melting into his boots. He stepped outside, latched the door of the coop behind him, and began to walk against the wind towards the houses as the gunshot in his thigh burned, a fiery line against the cold he was feeling everywhere else. The snow hadn’t piled high yet – perhaps a foot laid on the ground, not more - but it was enough to soak into his boot and pants by the time he had made it past the outer houses and was walking down the main street of the small town. The street was devoid of people or cars, and he could hear the soft crunching of the snow beneath his feet as he walked forwards towards where light was spilling out of the ground-floor windows of a building to his right. He couldn’t read the Cyrillic on the sign hanging off the front of the building, but there was a beer mug on the left next to the text, and he figured that he was more or less in the right place.

There was no bell over the door to announce his arrival the same way there might be in a store in the Midwest, but the man sitting at the greasy bar looked up anyway. He didn’t fit in with the locals, who were all wearing rough-looking working pants and interesting variations on the theme of “wooly sweater” for a shirt. The man wore an inexpensive suit that had obviously been altered to fit like it did, making an attempt at hiding the physique of a fighter and the gun holster Clint was pretty sure he spied at his side, but which placed him in a hilarious contrast with his surroundings and with the dirty glass of beer he was holding in his hand, presumably pretending to drink while he was waiting for Clint to show up.

And shown up Clint had. He didn’t even have the energy to truly care about the fact that he had been outplayed so hard and fast he had literally voluntarily walked into a room with what had to be one of the men who had been following him for the past few days, hunting him across Russia, while he walked forwards and sat beside the man at the bar. He wanted to lay down and take a nap, now that he was in a building with central heating and a floor that wasn’t composed primarily of chicken shit. Most of all, he wanted to stop running.

The man next to him looked up as he pulled out a bar stool and sat down. “Barton.”

“Asshole. I’d say introduce myself, but you know my name already.”

The man crooked an eyebrow at Clint, looking him up and down as though he’d expected a different reply, and Clint couldn’t help but feel a sort of bitter vindication. Here he was, about to be put down like a rabid dog or dragged off to Guantanamo, and he still didn’t live up to expectations. Figures.

“You’re a remarkable man, Barton. Of course I know your name.” The man set down his glass and turned to face Clint, who looked out across the bar. He didn’t want to talk to this stranger who was trying to goad him into conversation. He wanted…

He wasn’t sure what he wanted anymore, really. Not this.

“I’m agent Coulson from the Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement Logistics Division,” he pauses for half a second, “or SHIELD, and I’d like to offer you a role in our agency as a field agent.”

Clint stared. There’s a lot he’d thought could happen when the various governments and organizations hunting him across the globe finally, inevitably caught up. There are certain things he’d pretty much expected: a bullet to the head, for one. He had not considered being offered a job as a member of one of them, and the protection it implied.

The man’s, Coulson’s, eyes never left his face as Clint looked at him and considered. He doesn’t know these people. SHIELD is a whisper, definitely American, definitely governmental, but the rest is as uncertain as the weather in London in the spring. They might recruit him, treat him nicely, but there’s no telling for certain they’ll let him stick to his personal code of morals. There’s no telling whether they’ll tell him to give up the bow for good and stick to the cold anonymity of a rifle. There’s no telling whether they won’t drop him like a hot stone the minute they have what they want from him. He doesn’t know these people, and they’ve given him no reason to trust them yet other than the fact that agent Coulson hadn’t shot him on sight, and is still looking at him, waiting for his answer.

But. He’d been running for a year now, and if he looked further than that he knows he’s been running for longer, running since he met a shadow on a roof in Moscow and was bested by someone at his own game for the first time, or maybe even before that, running since his father smashed his mother’s head in and Barney had grabbed his hand and taken off.

He didn’t want to keep running. His thigh is was burning from the gunshot, and his fingers were starting to tingle, heating up in the stuffy heat of the bar after being frozen outside. He swallowed with a thick throat, and his voice came out cracked and broken when he spoke.

“A job, huh? What’s a secret agent like you want with some poor hick in the middle of nowhere in,” he thought back to the road signs he’d seen on his way here on a stolen bike, but they’d been in Cyrillic, and he hadn’t exactly had time to ask the bartender for the name of the place, “something something, Novosibirsk?” He tried for a grin, a smirk, but from the way Coulson’s eyebrow twitches again he suspected that it came out all wrong, probably too sharp at the edges and dull around the eyes.

“We both know you’re not a hick in Novosibirsk, Barton.” Coulson looked him in the eye, steady and confident. “You’re Clinton Francis Barton, alias Hawkeye. You’re an assassin for hire with a long list of unconfirmed kills, because you’re apparently not stupid enough to use recognisable weapons where others can find the evidence. You’re known to be proficient with any gun or rifle you care to pick up, and there are hints that your marksmanship extends to other projectile weaponry like bows. We speculate that your covert skill are considerable, although we don’t have a clue where you could have possibly picked them up.” Here, Coulson twitched the corner of his mouth. “Care to give us a hint, Barton?”

Clint looked at this man in a suit, sitting in a dark bar drinking beer from a dirty glass, talking to a man he knows is a world-class assassin (and Clint is tired now, so very tired, but that doesn’t mean he is any less dangerous – if anything, he is more lethal now), and who looked as though his amusement at his own lack of intel was almost enough to overcome the overwhelming boredom he was feeling. He looked at Coulson, with his steady eyes, and thinks that maybe, maybe joining him wouldn’t be so bad.

“Yeah. Yeah, why not.”


	4. PART 4

He’d been with SHIELD for three years before they send him anywhere near Russia again. The first year they hadn’t even let him off base as he was put through basic training and evaluations. The second year they’d let him out, but kept him on a leash so short he was practically prancing on his handler’s toes, to the annoyance of both him and the poor sod they stuck him with. He got prissy, annoying, _insubordinate_ , when he was bored, and they’d passed him around half the agency after each of his handlers quit in record time. The third year, they’d given up and shoved him into Coulson’s office and finally, finally given him real work to do.

The thing is, whether he’s Hawkeye or Clinton Francis Barton, designation epsilon-alpha-three-eight-alpha-five-four-six (or Ronin, but Ronin had been different, less showy and better hidden than Hawkeye, and he’s starting to suspect that instead of hiding their knowledge about that dark aspect of his self, it’s something SHIELD don’t actually know about), he’s always been more than good at what he does. He knows he’s an exceptional sniper, a very good fighter, and a decent covert operative. The milk runs he’d been assigned to for the past two years had never gotten close to even stretching his limits, and he suspected that someone at HQ had noticed he was about to go crazy from being confined for so long, and had passed him off to Coulson instead.

Coulson, who has risen on the food chain to go from bringing in mopey assassins from southern Russia to a senior field agent, and whose suits have upgraded to match. Coulson, who handles a team of assets and coordinates operations all over the world. Coulson, who has the straightest face in the history of mankind, and _Jesus Christ_ , Clint has never seen him so much as twitch an eyebrow again after that one time in Novosibirsk, but he swears that during half of the conversations they have, the guy is laughing at him from the inside. Coulson, who is seemingly the only face other than the other probie agents and Assistant Director Hill he’d ever seen twice in his time at SHIELD (and Hill is scary, no way is he ever going to be anything but perfectly _yes ma’am, no ma’am_ in her presence), and who is steady enough with his straight face and his honest eyes that for the first time since Barney, Clint had felt like he could depend on someone to help him if he asks for it (and it doesn’t hurt that the first thing Coulson promised him when they dump him in his office with shiny new level three clearance is complete honesty, and that he didn’t ask for anything in return).

It’s pretty great when they finally give him Coulson (or give Coulson him, semantics), because, like Clint, Coulson is good at what he does. He leads, he coordinates, he organises. His intel is good, and Clint can respect the sheer confidence with which the man can walk through a battlefield, approach the enemy, and state “I am agent Coulson of SHIELD, and I will be taking your surrender,” with a straight face and without flinching (seriously. Clint’s seen him do it, and he’s not easy to impress, but damn). Plus, Coulson puts up with his incessant chatter over comms when they’re out in the field together, which is a huge relief. He’s capable of complete silence and infinite patience – he wouldn’t be a sniper otherwise, and besides, he’s had to exercise those skills with a frankly depressing frequency to keep from getting captured and/or killed. But it’s incredibly boring to sit on a lonely perch for hours on end when you know nobody’ll be showing up for another half a day, and to keep quiet besides.

He knew that for the past few months, Coulson had been testing him, putting him through his paces and seeing what he could do. After the first two years of being dead bored, it felt good to finally stretch his legs again and run all across the globe, except that this time, instead of running away it feels like he’s running towards something. The ops he’d been put on had grown progressively more difficult, until six months after being assigned to Coulson he’d found himself alone on a rooftop in Kursk, with two other ground agents for backup and Coulson in a van somewhere (three streets away: down the left fire escape, jump to the ledge of the other building and down from there, right, right, left, across the intersection and into the third alley; he did pay attention during briefing, contrary to popular belief) monitoring their operations. It was the first time he’d been allowed to choose the strategy with which they were going to take out the target, and he didn’t want to fuck this up, but it was boring on this rooftop, and he’d know when the target (a diplomat who’d succumbed to a particularly nasty case of bribery by child-traders) would arrive.

“Hey Coulson?”

A sigh came from the other end of the comm. Coulson was waiting for the same thing Clint was, but at least he had airco and his mission reports to entertain himself with. Clint had a bow, a quiver, a sandy-beige tac suit covering his entire body, and a location that’d get him spotted if he made a single move (which, granted, was entirely his own fault, he’d picked the place, but still. It’s entirely unfair).

“Radio silence, Barton,” came the murmured reply.

“Aww, sir, don’t be like that. I’m lonely up here.”

One of the other agents snickered quietly into his comm at Clint’s flirtatious tone. He’d added it to the Hawkeye character just after joining SHIELD; by now, the people he worked with regularly all knew how Barton got in the field when he was bored.

“And whose problem is that, Barton?”

“Mine, sir, but don’t worry, I’ll gladly share with you. They do say sharing is caring.” He thought he heard a faint exhale from the comm, almost as if Coulson had let out a slight laugh, but he couldn’t be sure.

“Barton, if you decide to share your interpersonal issues with me, I’ll share my stack of unfilled requisition forms for range ammunition with you. Radio silence unless you’ve got something relevant to say.”

“How’s this for relevant. Target spotted, sir, taking the shot pending your approval.”

“Take the shot at your leisure.” Barton carefully drew and took aim at the figure in a red dress and tall heels, internally counting his breaths. When she stepped around a corner and was out of sight of the two goons standing in front of the embassy, he exhaled and let the string of his bow glide from his finger. Half a second later, she was falling with an arrow through the nape of her neck as the two other SHIELD agents stepped out of the shadows and caught her body. For this type of work, a bow was great – much quieter than a rifle or handgun, and much easier to conceal in a normal suitcase.

“Target down. Besides, you’ve seen my handwriting. Do you really want to torture Accounts like that?”

The only response over the comm was a slight exhale as Clint slid back from the edge towards the roof door, and then, “All agents to extraction point within twenty minutes. Good job, people.”

After the Kursk op, the style of assignments he received changed. Before, they had been missions as part of a team, where he was often the back up sitting in a tree somewhere waiting for the other agents to get shot at so he could start shooting back, or simple assassination-style assignments where they put him in the field to take out a problematic variable SHIELD didn’t feel like dealing with. He had no problems with that type of work – the teams were usually fine, since nobody got recruited to SHIELD for their nice face, so they were all professionals he could respect, and they gave him information on the targets, with the reasoning behind who they were and why they needed to be removed from the game – but it was monotonous. After Kursk, though, he got upgraded to level four and started being sent out on longer, less straightforward assignments. They gave him extra training in infiltration, in sneaking in and out of places without being seen or heard even by cameras, and in resisting torture and interrogation when he was caught. They taught him how to operate all manners of transports, from fixed-wing planes to large transport trucks. They gave him new ammunition, grapple arrows and tranquilizers and even a prototype for one that was supposed to have an incendiary device at the arrow head, and he spent days on the range getting used to the balances of the different types.

When he was sent out into the field, it was often alone or as part of a small strike team. SHIELD had several of these specialized teams, each with only three or four people in it, and Clint quickly realized they were rotating him around them trying to find a good fit. The assignments they went on were varied. Sometimes they had to infiltrate and steal something, other times stop a terrorist group from blowing up something semi-relevant. On one rather memorable occasion, he was sent with a strike team to Singapore to take out some drug dealers and they ended up rolling up a human trafficking ring.

The first time he realized something was truly different about his role within SHIELD, however, was four and a half years after he got fished out of that Russian bar, when he was called out in the middle of the night on an op that hadn’t been scheduled beforehand, and the preparations for which he’d heard nothing about. As he came walking out the hangar with all his gear assembled, moving towards the plane, Coulson turned towards him from where he was talking to a tall black man wearing a… leather coat and eye patch (leather coat? Eye patch? He had almost been sure that being with SHIELD had erased his sense of _weird_ but even for a top-secret superspy organization an eye patch was a bit over the top).

“Barton, good. Catch.” Coulson flung something metal and shiny at his face, and he automatically reached up to catch it. “Level five clearance, effective immediately. You’re being sent out to the Kabul base. Wheels up in five, briefing’s on the plane.”

“Yes sir.” He pocketed the badge, nodded to the man in the leather coat (what the fuck, dude, but the man made it work somehow), and started towards the yet. As he walked away, he heard the other man ask.

“Was that the one you were talking about?”

“Yes.”

Kabul was horrible. Him and Coulson had been called in to solve a hostage crisis, with a terrorist group holding an entire SHIELD team and threatening untold horrors if fifteen million US dollars did not conveniently appear in their bank accounts _right this moment_.

All operatives were told when they joined that if captured by enemies, the best they could hope for was a rescue. A ransom was off the cards; when Clint had been told this, the senior agent holding the briefing had told him that SHIELD didn’t like to encourage bad behavior. However, just because they didn’t make a habit of ransoming their operatives didn’t mean they simply left them somewhere to be killed off by terrorists. The same senior agent had told Clint that SHIELD operatives were terribly difficult to come by, and it was a waste to let them die off like bunches of peonies on a frosty night (he’d never been entirely sure whether to love that man for his humour or be scared to death of him. He still wasn’t sure now).

But Kabul was no ordinary op; Kabul was seven hours under the burning sun waiting for the word from Coulson in his command van. Kabul was Clint sprinting into the base they were rescuing agents from after intel had given the go, but still arriving too late. It was three agents dead and dismembered in a stuffy cell, and the remaining four so shell-shocked they could barely stand, let alone make it to the extraction point. It was fighting in the narrow tunnels of an underground terrorist base, fighting in the spectacularly brutal way Clint hadn’t had to do since he was an independent. It was barely avoiding a bayonet to the ribs and retaliating with the flick of a knife to slit his attacker’s throat; it was slipping on slick blood coating the floor as he turned around a corner and shot the three terrorists sprinting at him through the head, blood and brains splattering on the floor behind them. Kabul was emerging in the brutal, burning afternoon sun with a light head and an empty stomach, but with no further SHIELD casualties other than the agents who had already been dead when they got here.

And, most strikingly, Kabul was the first time they’d sent him and Coulson somewhere as a duo rather than as part of a larger team. He’d been good at infiltration, at sneaking around, since a young age, and he was better now that they’d given him a specialist’s training, and so he went in alone with nothing more than three guns, several knives, a garrote, extra ammo, and Coulson’s voice in his ear guiding him through the layout of the base.

After Kabul, they work together more and more often, and they become more comfortable in each other’s company. Usually, when Clint is out in the field gathering information or stealing the latest mad scientist’s plans for world domination so that R&D can have a look at them, Coulson’s voice is in his ear. Clint’s shiny new level five clearance allows him access to the fun toys, too, so he learns to fly a Quinjet and gets pulled in for more frequent backup missions, called into situations where one well-placed man is all that’s needed to turn the tide to SHIELD’s favour. It tickles him in funny ways when he learns that sometimes, not even the SHIELD agents on ground know he’s there – especially when it’s one of Coulson’s ops he’s pulled in on, as if he were an ace up the man’s sleeve.

(Still, regardless of how well Clint may or may not have gotten to know Coulson while out on the field, he almost chokes on his own spit the first time he sees the man trade for a vintage Captain America card _while in an active warzone_ , and then spends the next three hours on transport laughing about it.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello folks who've dragged along this far!  
> I'm not quite done yet with parts five and six, but they should be up within a week or so barring major interruptions.


	5. PART 5

Budapest was not in Russia. It was in Hungary, which was a part of the Soviet sphere of influence until the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990. Before that, Hungary was briefly an independent state, and before that, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Clint knew this. Budapest didn’t look like Russia either – too clean, too open, too many tourists on the street loudly admiring the architecture in foreign languages. But in terms of being stuck on a stupid, windy rooftop in motherfucking December while freezing his ass off because _logistics hadn’t done its fucking job again_ and now he was missing his specialized cold wear, it reminded him a lot of the way his missions in Russia had usually inevitably gone wrong. The way this one could go wrong, too.

This op was more dangerous than any of the other ones he’d pulled of for SHIELD before. Coulson had picked him up from his bed at 0400 in the morning with even less warning than usual for one of what Clint had come to think of as their two-man stunts, and it had become clear as to _why_ the moment Coulson had handed him the briefing packet as they entered the Quinjet marked for their transport.

Their assignment was to take out the Black Widow, currently occupying variously numbers one, three, one, and two on the “shoot these people if you see them, Barton, but not until we tell you to” lists of SHIELD, the FBI, the NSA, and the CIA respectively (he found it ironic he was shooting people for pay again after getting so tired of doing it before, but he had to admit there was a certain satisfaction in knowing your shot was saving a hell of a lot of lives; that, and SHIELD gave marksmanship awards). SHIELD knew she was an assassin, was almost certain she was Russian, guessed she had more kills than anyone in the world would ever know, and entertained vague speculation on who she actually was and what she was capable of. It had been sheer luck that lead to an ops agent overhearing that the Widow would be in Budapest to carry out a deal, allowing SHIELD to jump in and hopefully take her out of the equation.

All of which lead to Clint, on a roof with his second-favourite long range rifle (goddamn logistics, he had filled out forms about this voluntarily, but here he was on a roof in Budapest with his second-favourite, thanks a lot) and Coulson in his ear as both of them stared at the window of the hotel room the Widow had booked under a cover identity for the night. According to their intel and best speculation, she had a meeting to set up a contract until 8pm, after which she would return to the room where she’d set up a base of operations.

In itself, the hotel room wasn’t chosen badly. At the corner of the building, the window was placed exactly so that Clint had only had one choice of perch on an old post office a block away, from which he could only see into parts of the room. The hotel was set in an inconspicuously inexpensive part of the city near the business district, and had two separate exits emerging on different streets. The identity used to book the room, Nataya Rushkha, had a full background and checked out flawlessly when base checked it in their super secret computer database. A bus station, two metro stops and a good connection to a nearby train station made the location one Clint would probably have picked if he were out on a similar job.

But.

But, but, but. Something wasn’t sitting right in his gut. SHIELD had been hot on the Widow’s heels for the better part of a year, and they’d never gotten within shooting distance of her before, let alone been able to get a pin on where she was going to be. The Black Widow was the best currently out there, so good at covert that not even most of the mercenary world had known she existed (alright – he hadn’t, but he’d always been slightly more good at staying on top of the latest news than most of the others, so that counted for something). It shouldn’t have been possible to set up this entire op without somehow triggering one of the Widow’s webs and setting her running. He remembered when he was on the run from SHIELD, tired of his life and the blood staining his hands and his bowstring, how he’d walked into that bar in Novosibirsk and, instead of surprise or anger, felt only a weary relief that finally, _it was done_.

It could be he was projecting his own past with SHIELD onto the Black Widow. It could be that they’d finally gotten lucky with intel and timing. It could be that they’d somehow, inexplicably gotten the drop on the Widow without her knowing – but that was very unlikely. He and Coulson were good, very good even, possibly the best two-man team for dark missions that SHIELD had, but Clint had read the Widow files he had clearance for even before this mission. She was something else again, ruthless and unchecked in a way he and Coulson could never be while working for SHIELD.

They shouldn’t have been able to catch up with her. It was as simple as that, and it meant that the op they were on was more dangerous than either of them had suspected that morning, when they entered the quinjet at 0410 and powered her up. The worst part was that Coulson had agreed with him when he’d quietly mentioned his speculations on the flight here. Knowing that Coulson, unflappable, competent, badass Coulson, was smelling something fishy was enough to put Clint on edge indefinitely.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this, sir,” he joked quietly into his mic. They’d been able to stay on comms only because R&D had managed to create a scrambler that switched the frequency every ten seconds at random, so that if someone chose to listen in they’d get maybe two sentences at most. It wasn’t perfect, but Clint was aware that it was a damn sigh better than not having ears on one another at all.

“Tell me about it, Barton,” came the reply from the other end. “No movement on the spider’s position. The room?”

“Light still off, curtains closed. If she’s having a party, she’s not throwing it anywhere near us.”

“We both know you wouldn’t make the guest list anyway.” Clint grinned. Coulson’s snark was usually toned way down when they were at base, but when it was just the two of them out into the field he tended to let it slip out.

“Sir, you wound me, you truly do.” The other end of the comm was silent, and Clint returned his focus to staring at the curtains across the block and ignoring the cold air fluttering across his back.

The Widow was four hours late to her own hotel room, which was enough time for Clint and Coulson to start wondering whether the suspected set-up would prove to simply be very, very boring instead of possibly lethal, and if they’d receive a call of a Widow sighting halfway around the world tomorrow morning. However, shortly past midnight the light flicked on in the Widow’s room.

“The spider’s home, sir.”

There was a minute pause in Coulson’s response as Clint imagined the man recalculating his own timeline of events.

“I didn’t get a visual of her entering the building,” _she slipped our cameras._ Are you sure it’s the right room, Barton?”

“Yes, sir. No visual inside the room, so I- hold on, she’s opening the curtains.” He stared at the silhouette outlined against the light of the hotel room as a woman (yes, definitely a woman, those were female curves, he could confirm) opened the curtains, unlocked a sliding door, and stepped outside to lean against the railing of the balcony. He could see her brown hair shining in the light from the room, and that she was wearing a tight pencil skirt and a blazer tucked over a blouse, but he couldn’t see her face. “Spider’s outside on the balcony, not going anywhere. Sir, what the fresh hell is going on here? Are we sure this is the right woman?”

Rule number one of not being killed by whatever fresh-faced idiot had decided to style themselves a headhunter yesterday was not to expose yourself to the public unless at all necessary, or unless you were sure it would play in your favour. The Widow would know this. The Widow would not hesitate to use this, to turn this into a trap.

But, but, but.

“Barton, do you confirm sight on the target?”

“Sir.”

“Barton,” and there was tension now in the way Coulson’s voice filtered through the comm, “confirm you have sight on the target.”

“Sir, are we sure this is the right course of action?” The woman had turned her head to look down the street, facing away from Clint. Her neck was clearly visible in the yellow light from the room, and it would have been so easy to simply press the trigger and watch the bullet tear through her airway and into her spine. It was almost as if-

“She’s waiting for us.” Clint heard the miniscule feedback over the comm that meant Coulson had startled just enough for it to become audible in the way his suits moved.

“Barton, report. Does she know we’re here? Do you require extraction?”

“No, sir. But she knows I’m here. She’s waiting for it, she won’t fight this. Sir,” and Clint knew that Coulson knew what was coming next, “I’m sorry, I can’t do this.”

Coulson barely had time to begin a _Barton, don’t you dare_ before Clint had ripped his comm out of his ear and was rappelling down the building to meet the Widow.

Later, in between shooting up half of the Budapest underworld (he briefly wondered whether he wanted to know how the Widow had managed to piss all of them off, and then decided he was better off not knowing) and running towards Clint’s extraction point, she’d scowled at him while tying a bandage onto his thigh and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. “Idiot. That was stupid.”

He grinned up at her from his position on the floor. She was even more beautiful up close, but in a cold, detached sort of way that suggested she knew exactly what she looked like, and didn’t much care.

“You’re very welcome,” he replied, causing her scowl to deepen.

“Your accent is shit, American.”

“I know.”

Coulson was mad. No, Coulson wasn’t mad, he was furious. So furious that, when they stumbled into the small kiosk that was the designated meeting point, he barely glanced at Clint before welcoming the Widow, contacting HQ, and scrambling his laptop out to do important paperwork on the mission that did not involve acknowledging Clint’s existence.

He knew he’d fucked up their relationship, that he should have told Coulson about his actions, that he should have kept his comm in. Coulson had had no way of knowing whether he was dead or alive during the hours he was running around Budapest with the Widow until he’d seen him at the extraction point, and Clint had known how Coulson would take not knowing the fate of one of his agents. But if he’d told Coulson about his plans, the man might have agreed with Clint and allowed him to take the mission off-book. That would be worse, because this way, with Clint taking the initiative, he was the only one who could get blamed for insubordination and endangering mission objectives (never mind that he’d recruited SHIELD the best professional assassin on the market – the bureaucrats back at HQ were sticklers for the rules like that). Coulson might be mad at him, but he’d keep his job and his clearance, and that was the important part. SHIELD needed Coulson, and Coulson lived for SHIELD. He wouldn’t – couldn’t – compromise that.

“Barton.” He looked up from his boots to see Coulson standing in front of the shelving he’d sat down against, composing his face into the most neutral expression he could manage.

“Coulson, sir. I-”

“Do you require medical attention?” And that was typical Coulson, wasn’t it? To put aside all the anger and ire he must be feeling towards Clint to check whether his agent was okay, (he doubted he’d be a SHIELD agent for much longer, but it was nice while it lasted, to know that someone had to care how he was doing). The man looked older than his forty-something years in the bright, pale lighting of the small kiosk. The muscles around his mouth were tense, and his usually impeccable suit had a small coffee stain on the bottom of the left lapel. His shoulders were drawn slightly forwards, as though he’d spent too long bent over that damn computer, and the fingers of his right hand were stained with black ink from the fountain pen he preferred on missions. Clint wondered when he’d started to know the other man well enough to notice these small details.

“Nah, sir. Just a graze on the leg, is all.” He looked Coulson in the eye and gave him his best Hawkeye grin, the one that was just a little wild and just a little leering, but the other man just sighed.

“Let me know if that changes, then.”

“Sir.”

Coulson had just begun to turn around when Clint replied, but the muscles in his back immediately tensed, and he pivoted back so violently that his tie flapped a little bit.

“Barton, for god’s sake, you _will_ respond to questions with yes or no. Is that absolutely clear?” Coulson looked a little wild around the eyes, and Clint realized that he’d evaded Coulson’s questions about his shot in the same way just before running off for fourteen hours in an Eastern European city with a known assassin, leaving Coulson behind with too little sleep and too much caffeine and without the knowledge of whether his agent was alive or dead or dying in a gutter somewhere. He felt slightly sick in his stomach, and he swallowed before replying with his eyes cast down to the floor.

“Yes, sir. That’s clear.” Coulson exhaled, and Clint thought he saw the other man’s facial features relax just a little bit before he nodded and replied.

“Good. Keep it that way.”

As Coulson walked away, he couldn’t help but feel he’d broken something that he couldn’t repair (just like before, just like all the other times he’d found something he wanted to hold on to an-)

The sun filtered through the grimy kiosk windows as the extraction team arrived and filed them into the car for transport back to HQ. It was a beautiful day for December in not-Russia. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Editing is down to the minimum, so any mistakes are on me and my lack of coffee.   
> The next chapter will be up in a little while again, but it's not written yet.


	6. PART 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beware, here there be grammatically questionable sentences and way too much sappy emotion.  
> Also: This chapter contains canon divergence after Captain America: The Winter Soldier that continues on into Avengers: Age of Ultron  
> Also: Clint is not in a happy place in this chapter. There is swearing, and it is plentiful.

Clint was tired.

It wasn’t like this wasn’t an uncommon state for him to be in nowadays. Ever since New York (ever since _him_ ) he hadn’t felt much other than tired. The Avengers had gone their merry ways afterwards, and Clint had been left alone in New York to figure things out. Nat hadn’t been compromised, and with Ph-

-with certain absences in the upper staff, she was sent all over the world to pick up the remains of Clint’s godawful mess while Clint moped about his mob-infested building and got a dog. He’d seen the others occasionally on Avenger missions, when Cap somehow managed to dig up a long-lost lover, who consequently took down SHIELD nearly single-handedly for asshole Pierce and Hydra. The Avengers had initially met up in Stark’s tower to evaluate the threat the Winter Soldier (and wasn’t that a mindfuck, to find out that the Soldat he’d met all those years ago was Barnes, Cap’s beloved from way back, and that the only reason he’d survived on that rooftop in Moscow way back when was probably his short stature, blond hair, and blue eyes) before Steve had walked in halfway through the meeting with the Soldier himself trailing behind him. Apparently he’d fished the sullen, dark-haired Soviet assassin out of the Smithsonian, and Steve introduced him as his childhood friend Bucky Barnes.

Everyone had stared at Steve for about five seconds flat before Stark mumbled something to himself about grandparent assassins in his living room, walked up to the man, and introduced himself. There followed the most hilariously tense round of introductions Clint had ever seen (and he’d been present that one time Fury had greeted the entourage of the new Secretary of Dense), but it had gone swimmingly well for a meeting between people who were fighting on opposite sides of a global intelligence war half a day ago. That is, right up until the moment where Steve had turned to Barnes and introduced him with an “-and this is Clint, or Hawkeye when he’s out on the field.”

Barnes tensed up so quickly it was almost funny, and refused to take the hand Clint held out while he glared at him and looked him over head to toe. Eventually, he growled at Clint.

“You’re that fucker who shot pinecones onto my head.”

Clint startled at that and shot the other man a raised eyebrow. From Steve’s quick introduction, it had been clear that Barnes had been under mind control while he worked for Hydra. He hadn’t been sure how much Barnes would remember now that he was un-Soldiered. And that of all things, he should remember Clint…

“Well, you almost threw me off a building the first time we met, asshole, so fair’s fair.”

Everyone else burst out talking at that point, presumably asking how the hell the two of them had met before, but Barnes just looked at Clint and gave a soft huff in the back of his throat. “Yeah. Are you still as shit at hand-to-hand or did you learn something from knocking around all of those goons?”

“Why don’t we find out?”

After that, it was different. Steve and Barnes settled into Stark’s tower together along with Bruce, who had been staying there already. Nat was still gone on missions as often as she wasn’t, but even she stopped by the Tower when she was in New York and wanted to hang. Since Clint had been _persona non grata_ at SHIELD even before it collapsed (not officially – the shrinks and Hill had assured him that Loki was not his fault, but he had infiltrated the ‘carrier and was personally responsible for the death of good SHIELD agents. It was clear they couldn’t trust him again, and that was fine, he understood), his social life pretty much revolved around the other Avengers, the inhabitants of his building, and Katie. He spent a lot of time at the tower getting to know Barnes, who was struggling with the remains of Hydra’s fucked up brainwashing, and Steve, who was the only one who understood even remotely what it was like to keep fighting a war when all your reason to do so had disappeared.

And then Tony had fucked up big time and built an AI bent on destroying civilization, like you do, (which, wow. Clint was used to making grievous life-changing mistakes, but this was a whole other level. The worst part was that Stark was very well aware of how badly this particular endeavor had gone, and seemed hell-bent on taking absolutely all of the blame and bottling everything up) and they’d had to fly out to save that Sokovian city with a fucking helicarrier (and he didn’t want to think of the implications of that, of Fury having his usual array of contingencies and back-up plans, and of the man who had written and organized half of them better than anybody would likely ever know) along with the wonder twins.

He didn’t like Wanda, and she didn’t like him, but he couldn’t blame her for that. Her mind control was too familiar for him, even if he could almost cast it off now, and he could never trust her because of that. But Pietro, the little bastard, had been good. And then he’d died in some sort of stupid self-sacrifice, and Clint had been unable to save him (again, he’d been unable to save him again, and he wasn’t sure when the line had started blurring, but it had, between Pietro and P-).

He couldn’t blame Wanda for blaming him for her brother’s death when he did too, after all.

They were at the new facility now, after Stark had given his tower back to Potts for Stark Industries to appropriate. Fury and Hill had somehow made it out to the place too from wherever they’d been laying low, presumably only to chew them out over how terrible the publicity of everything that went down in Novi Grad, and the look on the good Captain’s face said he and Stark were going to have words about building new AI’s without telling the team when the rest of them were out of earshot. Poor Tony; even usually Clint wouldn’t have liked to be on the wrong end of Cap’s disappointed face, but he guessed it would be three times worse for Tony, who was beating himself up to boot.

They’d collected in one of the communal rooms, gear and weaponry dumped in various locations as everyone got comfortable for the briefing. Banner was slumped in one of the chairs next to Thor, looking like he’d gone to sleep, while Bucky had swiveled his around and put his feet up onto Steve’s lap, who was speaking quietly to Fury while Sam stood next to them. Stark was seated at the other end next to Rhodey, the suit he’d thrown on after taking off his armor wrinkled and untidy while his friend still clunked around in the War Machine armor. Vision and Wanda sat on either side of them, respectively looking oddly at peace with and wary of their surroundings. Nat had disappeared to somewhere, possibly talking to Hill or possibly fixing her hair. Either one was equally likely, really.

Clint was sat near the end of the table with his bow in his lap, chair turned at an angle so that he could keep an eye on the door and the rest of the room simultaneously. They were in the central communal room of the compound and Clint had been tempted to ask exactly _how_ involved Pepper had been in the design process when they’d arrived, because the understated luxury of everything around them spoke of her influence and taste. Once he’d seen the designs, it hadn’t really been a surprise to find Fury and Hill already here when they arrived, given how prone those two were to sticking their fingers into absolutely every pie they could find. Nevertheless, Clint had expected the Avengers compound to include, you know, more Avenger per meter squared, and less SHIELD or Stark. The damn thing was huge, and Cap’s ideas of team bonding had better be ready for implementing in the next hour or so, because once they left this table he had the feeling they’d never find their way back together without a map.

He’d just begun counting the number of wooden squares on some kind of art installation Tony had seen fit to put in the corner out of sheer boredom when Bucky’s boots abruptly thumped against the floor. The soldier had sat up from where he’d been leaning back in his chair, and was frowning at the entrance to the doorway.

“Clint, Natalya is not-,” and then Clint heard it too, Bucky’s superhuman serum hearing having given him a slight advantage. Nat was yelling at someone. Nat, who never yelled or showed any emotion she didn’t explicitly want to be seen, but who he could hear clearly now, the melodic, terrifying sounds of Russian coming out of the hallway that lead to the outside of the compound. He’d heard her raise her voice only once in the entire time he’d known her, after that time he’d dived off a building without a line to take a shot that prevented her from being stabbed by an enemy agent. When he’d woken up in Medical, she’d spent a full five minutes yelling at him in Russian before storming out the room. It had taken a week of pleading before she’d spoken to him again.

This time, they weren’t in a private Medical room but in public, or near it anyways, and Nat was still yelling. He stood up and shot a worried look at Bucky, who was looking back at him with an expression that suggested mild terror. If anyone else here realized how unlike Nat it was to yell, it would be him.

“Keep everyone here. I will go see what is going on,” he spoke in Bucky’s direction as he stepped around Fury to the direction from which the yelling was coming. The rest of the team had noticed now, and they were looking to Clint as he hasted towards the door. Nat wouldn’t want the team to see her off balance unless she had a very good reason, and he had to figure out what it was before she rounded the corner and-

He was too late. The red, firebrand colour of Nat’s hair flashed in his vision while she came around the corner backwards, dragging a man in a suit out from the hall as she shouted at him. But he wasn’t listening to what she was saying, because _oh gods_.

He’d known, of course, that SHIELD had more secrets than it had truths, that Nick motherfucking Fury spoke in lies, half-truths, and misinformation like it was his mother tongue. Every operative knew that there were things happening off-books that were even more morally questionable than usual business. SHIELD was painted in shades of grey, and they all stumbled close to black at points. Hell, Clint had been there himself – legally, he didn’t exist between the time SHIELD recruited him and the time some asshat had caught his face on camera in New York (and hadn’t that been fun, for tech to scramble into the systems and make up identities before someone in the general public figured out that two of the Avengers were legally nonexistent), and he’d gone in black as part of backup more often than he cared to count. He knew that, even with his level seven clearance putting him head and shoulders above a large part of the organization, there were things he’d never know and never need to know.

But Nat had dragged Phil Coulson out of the hallway and back from the dead, and he had promised not to lie to Clint.

He was dimly aware of the entire room going silent, of a collective intake of breaths from everyone except Wanda, Sam, Vision, and Bucky. He could see Fury from the corner of his eye, looking as carefully blank as Clint had ever seen him, but not surprised (of _course not_. Fury, the puppet master, was unlikely to ever look surprised at anything, even his friend returning from the dead, but he’d seen this particular brand of bland say-nothing before. Fury had orchestrated his living status, and had kept Clint and Natasha in the dark, probably with logical, even understandable, motives, but in the dark nonetheless, and on a detached level he registered a sort of satisfaction in the fact that the mystery of the shouldn’t-have-existed helicarrier was now solved). He saw Steve’s face, pale and drawn, and the slightly green tint of Banner’s skin, both of their features exactly matching Tony’s incredulous expression as they saw a dead man walk into the room. He saw Thor’s eyebrows going up in a look of quizzical confusion, and remembered the conversation he’d had with the man after New York, when he’d explained in careful words that Humans were more fragile than Gods, and couldn’t heal a heart nearly sliced in half even if they had all the resources in the world at their disposal. He saw the rage written large across Natasha’s face, obvious in a way he’d never seen it before.

He didn’t see him, drawing to a halt as he entered the room full of Avengers. He saw Agent, the impeccable, classical black-on-white suit he wore, the polished shoes, the ever-present hint of a firearm at the man’s side. He saw the expression on the man’s face – tired, stressed, anxious, angry, and missing that ever-present spark of calmth and excitement that had always resided in the man’s eyes. He saw his eyes – blue and grey, filled with a mix of wonder and terror and indignation all hidden behind a vein of steely indifference – and he felt his jaw lock as he dropped his bow and walked out of the room.

He heard the chaos erupt behind him, but he didn’t stop.

“Coulson, you sick son of a –“

“He just _dropped_ his bow!”

“Director, with all due respect, what the fuck?”

“We thought you were _dead_.”

“Fuck him, someone go after –“

The last thing he head before he walked through the door to the outside was Natasha’s steely, cold voice.

“Explain.”

He closed the door.

\---

He found Clint hours later on the roof, staring towards the east as the sun began to finally set.

Clint was sitting on the ledge, feet dangling down, with his empty quiver laying at his side. High places had always made him feel safe in the past, like he was unreachable, untouchable. Like he could fly, if only he chose to, except now he felt more like he was already falling and there was still a long way down.

He didn’t approach, but stopped a few meters behind him. He knew that Clint knew he was there.

“Barton.”

He couldn’t help the tension pulling into his shoulders at the sound of his last name, or the way his hands gripped the edge of the roof. He closed his eyes, and inhaled.

“Agent Coulson, sir.”

There was no fiery explosion, or grand orchestral symphony when he spoke his name. Planets and stars did not align themselves. Flowers did not burst into bloom and the skies did not burst into rain. The sun set and the world was silent except for the wind whistling around the roof and the birds in the distance. Behind him, Coulson shifted and the gravel under his shoes creaked.

“What do you want?” It came out less biting, more careless than Clint had intended for it to, but there was no eating his words once spoken. There was a stilted pause like there had never been one between them before Coulson replied.

“I want to apologize.” At that, Clint choked out a bitter laugh. He had spent literal _years_ apologizing to a ghost, and now the ghost, now _Coulson_ , had come back to say sorry for inconveniences caused or paperwork delays or something similarly banal. It hurt, badly, that the one ghost he wouldn’t mind returning had come back – but apparently in none of the ways he wanted him to.

“I don’t need or want your apologies, _sir_. Consider yourself absolved of any perceived sins.” From behind him, Coulson let out a sharp, pained exhale. If he were to look around, he knew he would see the man standing hunched over, silhouetted against the last vestiges of sun.

“Look, Barton, I understand that this is not ideal, but-“

That was too much. In one fluid movement, he flung his legs back over the railing and turned around, stalking up to Coulson until he was standing almost chest to chest with the man. He could see his anger reflected at him in the creases of Coulson’s eyes, and he imagined what he must look like now, still in his black tac gear, smelling of battle and violence. He heard the sharpness and the hurt in his own voice when he spoke.

“Don’t. Just- don’t. You don’t get to _die_ for two years and then come back and Barton me. We all mourned you, while you went on your merry way and got a Quinjet and traipsed around the world!” He realized that his voice was growing louder as he spoke, until he was shouting almost full-pelt into the other man’s face. “We mourned you, and you never looked back. Not to Nat, not to me, not to Steve motherfucking Rogers. Just to Fury. Line of duty, am I right? Do whatever the everloving fuck Fury says, like the goddamn mindless little puppet you pretend to be. And,” he threw up his hands, “now you think you can just apologize and be done? Sorry I pretended to be dead for TWO FUCKING YEARS, PHIL?” He wanted to cry so badly. “And just - be on your merry way, back to your hand-picked team and your jet and your bases? Jesus, Phil.” Clint stepped backwards and raked a hand through his already disheveled hair as he turned around to face the outside of the compound, blinking the moisture out of his eyes. “Screw that. You know what, screw all this. Just leave. Go. We’re done here, I think.”

“Clint.” He had never heard Phil’s voice so close to heartbreak before but, he guessed, there was a first time for everything. “Clint, I am so, so sorry. I wasn’t… You looked happy.”

It was a feeble excuse that barely even deserved that name, and they both knew it. He closed his eyes, and his voice was heavy.

“I was _not_ happy. You died, Phil.”

“You had a team again. You had SHIELD-“

“Bull. Shit.” He tried to keep the anger in his voice, to keep his distance, but this wasn’t Coulson talking to him anymore. It was Phil, who had always been so damn insecure and had never managed to realize just how invaluable he was to Clint, to SHIELD, hell, to the entire Avengers. Phil, who saw himself as a man amongst heroes, without realizing he was the hero they all looked up to. “We both know SHIELD wouldn’t have given a single shit if it wasn’t for Rogers stepping in. I was compromised, Phil. They would’ve been right to put me down, and they were right to treat me the way they did. But they were not a replacement for you.” He spun again, and there was no hope of keeping the emotions, the desperation, out of his voice now as he looked Phil in the eye. “It was never about SHIELD. It was about you, and then you died. I kept fighting because that was what you would have done,” he almost choked with the realization, “fuck, what you did do.”

“I’m so sorry I lied, Clint.” It’s a whimper-like sound that comes out of Phil’s mouth, and he can’t delay the inevitable any longer as they crash into each other and he wraps his arms around Phil’s back. He’s skinnier than Clint remembers, but he is warm and solid and alive and Clint is so fucking glad to have him back that right now, he almost forgets to breathe with the overwhelming wave of emotion that crashes through him.

“Fuck, Phil.” He buries his head on the other man’s shoulder, and it sounds like they’re both on the point of crying. He is still covered in sweat and grime from the battle, and Phil’s suit is rumpled in unmentionable ways from when Nat dragged him in, but right now Clint couldn’t care less as he holds on tighter than he’s ever had reason to before. Phil is here, and he is alive. They’ll deal with the rest as it comes.

Behind them, the sun slips down beyond the horizon and begins its slow ascent on the foggy shores of the other side of the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone!
> 
> Thank you so much for sticking through to the end of this fic. It's been a pleasure to write and an even greater pleasure to hear from you. I'll be editing some of the earlier chapters for tense switching and questionable use of m-dashes in a bit, but for now this fic is complete. Eventually, I may rewrite the whole thing outside of the confines of a 5+1 fic because I'm very happy with the way the timeline worked out, and I want to expand on some of the things I didn't get to touch on in the limited format (e.g: how did Clint and Phil get together after the Budapest fiasco? How did the formation of Strike Team Delta go? Etc.)
> 
> ~Tailish


	7. POST CREDITS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *winky face emoji*

“How did you know about the Bus, by the way?”

“Oh, May told me. She saw me storming out the building and correctly guessed I’d caught sight of your gorgeous, deceased ass. Decided to give me a sitrep. Funny that she’s on your team, by the way.”

“You know how it is with pilots – the best one is never available when you need them.”

“Oh, so that’s like fiancés, then? They just randomly disappear for two years?”

“Clint.”

“I am so not over this, Phil. Don’t even think about making any jokes like that for at least another two years.”

“Yes, dear.”

“…”

“I love you. You know that, right?”

“Go to sleep, Coulson.”

“Right?”

“Yeah. I love you too, you bastard.”


End file.
